kahawe, you seem to have heard a single story about Africa. I was born and have lived in Kenya all my life. I am another story of Africa.
You had one story of Africa, I have given you another. I suggest googling some more. Read my campaign again. You'll realize I'm not telling people to pity me, but see how awesome I am - because I am - and help me get even better!
michaell2, I respect your opinion, but to remove the doubts from your mind, I will give you a few links to show you a bit of what I have done. You can Google "Martha Chumo", or "Njeri Chelimo" (This is the name I use for github, twitter, etc) and check out the results. I have been featured on various sites cause of my learning. Checkout http://www.codecademy.com/stories/code-from-kenya . You can contact codecademy, and will tell you I'm a moderator there and I helped out creating the Ruby lessons. You can also contact teamtreeshouse.com, and ask about their student @NjeriChelimo. I have been very active in the community, and I am soon to be featured in the Treehouse Dean's list. Here's the link to my profile there -> http://teamtreehouse.com/njerichelimo. I have been contributing to the Apache deltacloud project -> http://deltacloud.apache.org/. You can contact the deltacloud devs and confirm that I exist, and that I can actually program. I was accepted as a speaker at DevCon Tel Aviv -> http://devcon-june2013.events.co.il/people/847-martha-chumo . You can contact the conf organizer and confirm this. I am the Nairobi MongoDB user group organizer. This you can confirm from the 10gen community manager. I try to blog - http://nchelimo.blogspot.com/ , http://njeri-chelimo.blogspot.com/ , http://njerichelimo.blogspot.com/.
You can also checkout my github account -> https://github.com/NjeriChelimo
I know there are a lot of cons out there, but I am definitely not one of them. I hope this clears your mind a little.
Hey GuiA! I like you're thoughts! Especially on the laptop! The Acer Aspire One netbook I bout with my savings when I started learning is making me go bananas ;). I'd totally appreciate that contribution! Feel free to contact me -> @NjeriChelimo on twitter. :)
About that kickass startup, it coming in much less than 10 years! #WatchThisGeekSpace ;)